NM Secretary of State

The secretary of state has received a $153,000 emergency loan to help pay for maintenance of the paper ballot voting systems used for elections in New Mexico.

The loan is to address complaints from counties about high prices for maintenance charged by the sole vendor of the voting equipment, Nebraska-based Election Systems & Software, known as ES&S.

The state Board of Finance approved the loan Tuesday but Gov. Bill Richardson urged Secretary of State Mary Herrera's staff to work with counties to have them pay a share of the maintenance costs rather than the state picking up the full tab.

The loan will cover six months of maintenance and support for software and firmware for more than 3,000 voting machines, including optical scanners in polling places that tabulate paper ballots and ballot marking machines for people with disabilities.

Deputy Secretary of State Don Francisco Trujillo told the board the office might have found enough money to pay for a full year of maintenance — about $306,000 — but a short-term loan was needed to immediately implement maintenance agreements for all counties until budget analysts could verify adequate money was available. The state will hold its primary election June 3.

Trujillo said interest had not been credited to a fund that previously held election money provided by the federal government. The interest is estimated to total $166,000. That, along with other state money in the fund, could pay for the software maintenance.

Secretary of State Mary Herrera's office hasn't used hundreds of thousands of dollars the New Mexico Legislature allocated over the past two years to fix a troublesome campaign finance reporting system.

The current electronic filing system, which dates to the 1990s, remains slow, difficult to use and doesn't allow data searches. Candidates, the public and journalists have long decried the software, which state law requires office seekers to use when filing campaign reports.

Office spokesman James Flores said the agency hopes to bank the money allocated by the Legislature and seek additional funds to eventually buy a new computer system. "We're going to be lobbying aggressively for those funds," he said of the proposed new system, which he estimated could cost between $800,000 and $1 million.

The latest round of complaints came this week, when the office announced it won't be able to post campaign reports on its Web site — including reports that candidates filed online — until May 26.

Monday was the most recent filing deadline for candidates in the June 3 primary elections.

Staffers blame the delay on the slowness of the existing system and say they need more time to scan in and post about 30 reports from candidates who asked for waivers from the online reporting requirement and filed on paper.

The state Board of Elections decided to post all candidate campaign finance information online at the same time, Flores said, to be fair to candidates.

The Supreme Court's refusal to strike down an Indiana law requiring government-issued photo identification at the ballot box could disenfranchise minority and elderly voters at next week's primary and prompt other states to pass similar laws, voting advocates said Monday.

The court, in a splintered 6-3 ruling Monday, said Indiana's law, which took effect in 2006 and requires voters to present a state or federal photo ID card at the ballot box, does not violate the First or 14th amendments. The court said the law served as a justifiable protection to the electoral process.

Voter System Firm Seeks New Contract: Secretary of state says there's no one else to provide maintenance

(Albuquerque Journal (NM) (KRT)

Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)

Feb. 27--SANTA FE -- The Nebraska firm that built New Mexico's voter registration system is seeking a no-bid contract to provide maintenance.

Nebraska-based ES&S is seeking a renewal after its original maintenance contract expired Jan. 6, a state General Services Department spokesman said this week.

"The secretary of state is trying to sole source this and they have to justify it -- that there's no one else who can operate it," said Alex Cuellar of GSD.

James Flores, spokesman for Secretary of State Mary Herrera, said his agency has "no choice" but to go with a no-bid contract. "It's their system," Flores said of ES&S. "If you buy a Volvo and something breaks down, you have to go to Volvo."

ES&S' attempt to renew the voter registration contract comes amid complaints that the state provided outdated or incomplete voter registration lists to the state Democratic Party and that they might have contributed to the party's problem-riddled presidential caucus on Feb. 5.

However, the Secretary of State's Office and ES&S say the firm played no role in the caucus problems because it does not remove or add voters' names from the lists. Responsibility for updating the lists falls to county clerks around the state.

"ES&S' role related to the New Mexico voter registration database is limited to providing centralized voter registration software, working with the state to implement the centralized system, and providing technical support in using the system," ES&S spokeswoman Jill Friedman-Wilson said Tuesday.

While some party officials have speculated the problems started with the state, other reports have suggested the problems began when the party -- which ran the caucus -- consolidated voting precincts across New Mexico.

JoshGeise, the state Democratic Party's interim executive director, declined to say where he thought the blame might lie.

Former Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron hired ES&S in 2000 to construct and maintain the state's centralized voter registration system. The recently expired agreement ran through Jan. 6, 2004, with the state able to grant four oneyear extensions, which it did.

Friedman-Wilson acknowledged that ES&S was seeking a renewal of the contract but would not discuss the terms Tuesday.

The state paid $195,000 for the software under the agreement. ES&S also charged counties varying fees for technical and software support.

The same firm outfitted New Mexico with its paper ballot voting machines and tabulators in 2006 and one of its subsidiaries maintains the secretary of state's campaign finance reporting Web site.

Following an internal assessment of voting machines used in 2004 and 2006, Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman fired off letters to major voting machine vendors informing them that their products had been decertified for use do the detection of serious flaws in their programming that could jeopardize the integrity of the 2008 vote count.

Listed below are the machines decertified and the primary reasons for their disqualification. Note that Precinct Optical Scanner, M100, decertified due to an "inability to complete testing threshold of 10,000 ballots due to vendor programmer errors," is the same model used in every precinct in the state of New Mexico.

Note that the ES&S iVotronic systems were decertified due to"vulnerability to security attack" and "failure to provide audit-able data to detect security violations."The iVotronic was used exclusively on election day2004in San Juan County, NM… no other NM County used this equipment. The election day undervote rate in precincts with >50% Native American populations was 5.8%. The election day undervote rate in precincts with >50% Anglo populations was 2.3%.

In addition, Colorado decertifiedSequoia Voting Systems (CO Sequoia Decertification.pdf ) for"failure to operate in a secured state requiring passwords" and "failure to provide auditable data to detect security violations." Sequoia Voting systems were used throughout New Mexico during the 2004 election. To see exactly where, check out this link.

To learn more about irregularities in the 2004 election due to e-voting, check out this study of the 2006 elections results, published onBrad Blog.

BREAKING FL-13: NEW UNDISCLOSED LETTER OF AGREEMENT FROM ES&S TO STATE UNEARTHED!
Terms of 'Independent' State Run Audit, Source Code Review Dictated by Voting Machine Company to Florida State Election Director Prior to Tests of Failed Touch-Screen Voting Systems from Contested Jennings/Buchanan Election!

The private voting machine company which manufactured the touch-screen hardware and software used during Sarasota, Florida's contested District 13 Congressional election between Christine Jennings (D) and Vern Buchanan (R) sent a letter in December of 2006 to David Drury, the chief of the state's Bureau of Voting Systems Certification, dictating the terms of the state-run audit convened to investigate the causes for massive undervote rate which seems to have tipped the election.

The extraordinary 3-page letter (posted in full at the end of this article) from Electronic Systems & Software, Inc. (ES&S) Vice President, Steven Pearson, is described as an "agreement" and instructs Drury on what may and may not be disclosed in the state's final audit report regarding the investigation.

we recommend that more pre-election testing be preformed on the systems utilized to generate the statewide canvass reports. This will insure that reports are accurate and will be timely generated after correction of any errors noted in re-generating accurate canvass reports after correction of errors were made causing delays in completing the statewide canvass and accountants review.